Thursday, January 12, 2012

Avarice on Trial

Can we hold that the GOP attacks on Romney will make some media and political types pay attention? At the moment, self-serving POTUS candidates are piling on our own Cap'n Brylcreem, Mitt Romney. They brush off a little of the unction to see how he eviscerated companies and discarded employees.

That's well enough and easy to show. If MSM pay a little attention though, the big issue, that myth of the job creator, is right before them.

Simple-minded and literal wingers do have a good talent in spreading catchphrases like so many dandelion seeds — just blow. There's lifestyle to suggest that homosexuals choose their orientation and therefore deserve unequal laws and treatment. There's unborn children to claim that lumps of cells even before they can be called fetuses are people, hence abortion murder. Now the uber-wealthy who suck money from the system instead of expanding and investing are job creators.

The reality is dishearteningly the opposite. Moreover, there's dozens or more analyses, most of it in no way left-wing, proving just that. If you haven't paid attention or doubt it, do start with a left-leaning special that recaps the loony campaign to suggest otherwise. On top, head over the Natural Bureau of Economic Research and nose around, like the report on how small and medium business are not the big jobs engine the GOP loves to claim. (That one is close to my heart from when I worked at Inc. magazine and heard everyone from Bernie Goldhirsh to business owners to association execs play that card.)

If you have any doubt that wealthy individuals and companies are not expanding or otherwise helping the economy, do research. Try your favorite publications via the net or library. It's only the most partisan and dishonest winger groups that pretend otherwise. The numbers are all there that prove lower tax rates kill jobs and resulting increased profits leave the larger economy.

Instead, we as a nation should be calling the fouls. First of all, in this God-awful recession/stagnation caused by unregulated greed, the long-term lamprey eels attached to the national belly need to contribute.

Pretending that the richest individuals and companies earned their bags of money from hard work and superior brains is madness. They played a rigged game. More important, once they got their money, they did not create jobs, did not expand and certainly did not share in the national pain. As a set, companies big and small whined about tighter credit, even though that was a reasonable response to their abuses and, well, theft.

When it came time to step up and heal the economy, they retreated and sought the safest places to hide their money. That's crap!

Their duty now is to create jobs not simply say they are job creators. Risk capital, as in capitalism, instead of tending their money trees. Expand, hire, put money in circulation, give consumers something to spend, revivifying that cycle that represents how capitalism can actually be both profitable and patriotic.

For the government, get your act together on real tax incentives. Times when we had real growth, company owners and execs had reason to invest, to, as the phrase goes, create jobs. If they'd lose money to taxes when they do not reinvest it, what do you suppose they do? Ding, yes, they expand, a.k.a. create jobs.

As the tax rates and rules are now, the owners get their biggest rewards by investing overseas and hoarding money. Instead, if they grew their domestic businesses in lieu of paying income to taxes, they'd be ableboath to employee Americans and profit right here from consumers with cash in the wallet.

I promise I won't smirk if they then call themselves patriotic as well. Don't talk job creator when you mean parasite.

Let's call for looking deeper than one candidate's greed and lack of compassion. Job creators need to create jobs to earn the honor. Let the lazy media look.